Maggie's Farm

An excellent review of the state of higher ed in the US from VDH: The Outlaw Campus.  He begins:

Colleges have gone rogue and become virtual outlaw institutions. Graduates owe an aggregate of $1 trillion in student debt, borrowed at interest rates far above home-mortgage rates — all on the principle that universities could charge as much as they liked, given that students could borrow as much as they needed in federally guaranteed loans.

Few graduates have the ability to pay back the principal; they are simply paying the compounded interest. More importantly, a college degree is not any more a sure pathway to a good job, nor does it guarantee that its holder is better educated than those without it. If the best sinecure in America is a tenured full professorship, the worst fate may be that of a recent graduate in anthropology with a $100,000 loan. That the two are co-dependent is a national scandal.

In short, the university has abjectly defaulted on its side of the social contract by no longer providing an affordable and valuable degree. Accordingly, society can no longer grant it an exemption from scrutiny.

I really disliked this snotty article: An America That Never Was: Norman Rockwell's Vision

For one thing, he did paint "an America that was." I lived it, it was my growing-up world. Not everybody's, but mine for sure in New England. Church, barber shop, the town drunk, the town meeting, teasing the girls, backyard baseball, the classrooms, all of it. Call it fine art, pop-art, illustration, whatever. Was Watteau a "fine artist" or an interior decorator? I'd say the latter. Picasso? No and yes.

Rockwell documented the small, mundane moments of ordinary life. His pictures are great fun to look at in the same way that Breughel's are. Paint can accomplish much more than a camera ever can, but it's all either for religious or secular entertainment.

The Rockwell Museum is in Stockbridge, MA, if you are ever passing through there. Same town as Alice's Restaurant.

"Pre-school" is just a fancy term for Day Care, aka Babysitting. Even the US government says it serves no educational purpose.

So why the push for it?

Does having a college degree guarantee that you can write a coherent, well-developed, logical and grammatical ten-page essay? Certainly not. Isn't that a high school skill, anyway (see No One Wants to Teach Writing - At Brooklyn College, professors pass the buck rather than take responsibility for students' writing)?

In the WSJ, We Pretend to Teach, They Pretend to Learn - At colleges today, all parties are strongly incentivized to maintain low standards. (paywall)

Is he exaggerating? Or are they mostly diploma mills, rent-seekers, needing the income? Remember the bumpersticker: "If all else fails, lower your standards" ?

There's only one way to find out: Post-College Exams:

"Right now a student graduating from, say, California State University at Fresno, Kansas State University, or the State University of New York at Brockport with a 3.3 average has a tough time getting considered for a good job. These schools, while by no means considered academic disasters or diploma mills, accept kids that were mostly above average but not exceptionally good high school students. A 3.3 average once denoted "a well above average student" but does not anymore in this era of grade inflation. In short, absent more information, this hypothetical student would be considered "a so-so student from a so-so university," perhaps not worth employers investing human resource department dollars to carefully assess and interview.

Enter the CLA + and the new Gallup-Purdue Index. Our hypothetical student can take the CLA+ and employers can see quickly and inexpensively how he or she fares relative to, say, a 3.1 student graduating from the University of Virginia, UCLA, or Swarthmore College, far more selective institutions.  On the basis of those test results, some of the students at the less selective universities will manage to get interviews and serious consideration by employers."

I think much of this is related to my post of a few months ago: "Unprepared" for college study

We love The Teaching Company (aka Great Courses), but you can't get "credit" for them. Just learning.

This guy tried online education:  An Online Education Odyssey - The author tries to bring some clarity to the online higher education debate by relating his own experiences.

From Greenfield, with whom we agree more and more: The American Bushwhacked still wonder what happened. When did this stop being a free country? There Ain’t No More Middle-Ground:

The average American still holds the fanciful belief that, if he isn’t annoying anyone, he should be left alone. To the people running his country, this is as bizarre and unworkable as Phrenology or the Geocentric theory or handing out universal health care without also compelling everyone to buy it.

This is not a nation where people are left alone anymore..

An entrepreneurial colleague has a smart start-up in Clyde Power Group.

For starters, CNG trucks and CNG converted engines.

The Only Leverage We Have Is Extreme Frugality

As someone who worked for a firm for many years, I have been self-employed for a while. The costs of self-employment are high:

- office space, maintenance, and insurances, including buying your own Disability
- work insecurity, erratic income, and no unemployment
- no paid vacations
- no splitting Social Sec and Medicare taxes with an employer - I pay 100% of it
- I find my own medical insurance and pay 100% of it
- Nobody contributes to my IRA except me
- no collegiality

With all that, it's understandable that most people prefer being employees. So what's the benefit?

Freedom. But freedom takes guts.

From Rudyard Kipling Was a Great American:

 Kipling, who turned thirty in 1895, would likely have stayed in Brattleboro had not a bitter quarrel with his drunken lout of a brother-in-law put an abrupt end to his New England idyll. The Kiplings had built a beautiful Indian-style bungalow high above the Connecticut River (it is still there), and had hired Carrie’s boorish brother, Beatty Balestier, to care for the meadows and build a tennis court (also still there). Their quarrel over money ended in physical threats and a histrionic court hearing attended by so many spectators and reporters that the proceedings were moved to the largest assembly room in the town hall.

The Dodo bird said "Everybody has won and all must have prizes."

In elite colleges today, "A" has become the average grade.  Therefore, high grades have little impact on employers.

From Why Grade Inflation Hurts Social Mobility:

Grade inflation, in my view, is a quite deliberate project of our most elite schools to secure the elitist advantage of their students from effective competition. Indeed, the center of grade inflation is the Ivy League.  As far as I can tell, the grade inflation is meant to protect the "brand" of the meritocrats earned by being admitted. To be sure, it's not that the students at Harvard or Princeton don't work hard.  It's just that their efforts occur in a safe and secure environment.  They're protected from real competition from excellent students at lesser schools.  Nobody is ever to say that an A at my Berry College is as good as an A or even A minus at Harvard.  So we professors in the sticks can't really win by sustaining grading standards too different from those used by our most prestigious schools. 

Related, If A Is Average, Say So--the Dawn of Honest Transcripts

"A"s are for sale.

The Late, Great American WASP - The old U.S. ruling class had plenty of problems. But are we really better off with a country run by the self-involved, over-schooled products of modern meritocracy? 

... the WASP elite had dignity and an impressive sense of social responsibility. In a 1990 book called "The Way of the Wasp," Richard Brookhiser held that the chief WASP qualities were "success depending on industry; use giving industry its task; civic-mindedness placing obligations on success, and antisensuality setting limits to the enjoyment of it; conscience watching over everything."

Under WASP hegemony, corruption, scandal and incompetence in high places weren't, as now, regular features of public life. Under WASP rule, stability, solidity, gravity and a certain weight and aura of seriousness suffused public life. As a ruling class, today's new meritocracy has failed to provide the positive qualities that older generations of WASPs provided.

Only WASPS know what "NOCD" means - but we often marry outside our tribe nowadays, just as Jews do. I am a loyal tribalist, myself. I think it works out for the best, speaking the same language, having the same social, psychological, moral, and behavioral expectations, finding familial comfort after the cultural adventures of youth. Every tribe has its own snobbery, its own unspoken language, and its own zone of comfort. Birds of a feather...We recognize our own peeps in an instant.

My tribe, my cultural ways, may not be dominant in the US anymore but, like other American subcultures, we retain and protect our ways of living and of doing the things we do within our own domains. There are lots of those domains left, but mostly private - and churches.

...a general problem with much of Western theology in my view is that the God portrayed is too small. It is a god of a tiny world and not a god of a galaxy, much less of a universe.

Carl Sagan on God, via this post

European Union’s fracking pronouncement: Full speed ahead, Britain.

But do they really need to ask permission?

For $100K, You Would At Least Think That College Grads Could Write.

Is it a college's job to teach people to write a coherent, legible, well-structured adult essay? It's not rocket science.  In my job, I have to do two or three daily.

Colleges are admitting unprepared students. It's about the money. Follow the money.

Legal polygamy is on its way: Polygamy - It's coming.

Legal prostitution and related arrangements are also on the way. These are all consensual arrangements between adults, and all have ancient histories. America's Puritan roots die hard.

We always joke that polygamy might be fun, but not if each wife had her own American Express Gold Card.

We have said this many times. It's babysitting: Pre-K Is for bureaucrats, not kids

It's also for unions.

VDH attempts to find logic in the upcoming immigration debates. One quote:

 Whereas the immigrant senses the fact that millions of people seek northward passage, while almost no American citizen seeks to immigrate southward — wealthy retirees excluded — the ethnic industry apparently does not. The advocates of illegal immigration almost never explain why there is illegal immigration in the first place. Instead, their politics assumes resentments and claims against the majority culture and politics of the United States. Given that incoherence, it is no wonder that the majority of Americans oppose illegal immigration and the assorted amnesties that are offered as its remedies.

The incoherent message of far too many open-borders advocates distills down to little more than this: “Millions have fled Mexico to America — historically an insensitive, racist and unfair place. Yet it nonetheless must extend amnesty to millions of Mexican nationals who prefer the morally suspect United States over their native Latino culture in Mexico.”

What the immigration debate is not about is ensuring that illegal immigration ends and that legal immigration becomes liberal, meritocratic, and ethnically blind.

Remember that, and all the absurd rhetoric of the upcoming 2014 debate will make sense.

Judge: NSA phone program likely unconstitutional

How could it possibly be constitutional?

Elizabeth Loftus is one of the most influential psychologists of all time, and also one of the most controversial.

She is not controversial. Terrible injustices were perpetrated back before she helped publicize the errors.

Turns out that an A is the most common grade given at Harvard College. Clearly, then, only an A+ would signal somewhat exceptional achievement. The elite schools are all "A" schools now except in math and the hard sciences. After all, you pay lots of money for these distinctions.

Here's a good idea: Indicate grade and average grade for the class.

However, I do understand the challenge of grading six or seven very smart, avid kids in a Chaucer seminar, each one of whom contributes interestingly and each one of whom memorizes verses in Old English and writes a fine, inventive, well-structured, and perfectly-grammatical essay on some aspect of the Canterbury Tales or The House of Fame.

Of course, any demanding prep school would expect the same.

The Demise of General Education:

 Perhaps nowhere is that degradation of the general education curriculum more evident than at the flagship public university in North Carolina – the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill – where students can cherry pick their general education classes from a list of 4,700 courses that run the gamut from “Love, Sex and Marriage in the Soviet Culture” to “The Gardens, Shrines and Temples of Japan.”

It’s a university at which the course “World Society: Sports and Competition” fulfills the same general education requirement as the class called “Comparative Economic Systems.”

Re-posted - Photo is a simple cheese board for dessert for about 6 dinner guests

Good cheeses must be treated with respect because plenty of effort, time, and pride goes into making them for you, and the tasty ones are mostly expensive. People always put out cheese and crackers at holidays. Here are The Barrister Family Rules and Tips about serving cheese:

1. The only thing Whole Foods (or whatever it's called now) is good for is the cheese department. That is quite good, and often the Cheese Man is somewhat knowledgeable and will give you a taste.

2. Best grocery cheese dept? Definitely Fairway. Best source of that Irish hard cheese - Dubliner - and of un-aged goat cheese? Costco. We love goat cheese. In Manhattan, Grace's Market has good, unusual, unpasteurized cheeses, and it's a fun shop for foodies. Also, the Grand Central Market in Grand Central Station has tons of tasty stuff including fancy cheeses.

3. Cheese as an appetizer or an hors d'oeuvre? Never. It's not done, not proper except as part of an Italian antipasto and even then only a couple of thin tasting slices. It wrecks the appetite and is too taste-powerful to precede a pleasant dinner.

4. Cheese should always be served at room temp, never cold. If a soft cheese gets a bit melty, so much the better because that's what it is meant to do.

5. Assorted cheeses on a buffet table? Of course. A Cheese Board as an after-dessert savory or, as I prefer, instead of dessert? Definitely.

But served how? Our theories on the topic are below the fold -

Are young college graduates changing the way we value college degrees?

 Brianna Flaherty, who graduated in May and lives in New York City before she’ll have “to give up and move home,” is unemployed. She spends hours on Craigslist and writing cover letters. When she interviewed at a bakery recently, there were 250 others competing with her to frost cupcakes at 5:00am.

“I no longer buy into the idea that having a degree will give you your dream job,” she told me. She’s exasperated. “I see on Craigslist that my Creative Writing degree, which cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, qualifies me to be a receptionist.”

When asked why that would be disappointing, she echoed Sterling: “My parents raised me to do something I was passionate about.”

This is via American Digest's Mike Rowe post: